Word: perelman
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...emphatic brows, bristle-broom mustache, prognathic jaw and mordant cast of eye behind steel-rimmed glasses. But when he described himself, there was no mistaking the original style of the most literate, widely traveled humorist of his time: "Button-cute, rapier-keen, wafer-thin and pauper-poor is S.J. Perelman, whose tall, stooping figure is better known to the twilit half-world of five continents than to Publishers' Row. That he possesses the power to become invisible to finance companies; that his laboratory is tooled up to manufacture Frankenstein-type monsters on an incredible scale; and that he owns...
...schoolboys in question have been around since the early '30s, when Sidney Joseph Perelman first began publishing his superbly crafted hilarity in the pages of The New Yorker. The magazine's readers soon developed a tart tooth for Perelman's brand of satire, a mix of burlesque and Joycean wordplay boldly colored by a fastidious disdain for the fake, the tawdry and the pompous. Even the titles of Perelman's "bits of embroidery," as he called his pieces, set new boundaries for comic absurdity: Somewhere a Roscoe; Beat Me, Post-Impressionist Daddy; Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus...
...Perelman's cosmopolitan imagination had a definite surreal twist to it. In "low dudgeon," he viewed the world's quirky moving parts as threats to his safety, sanity and solvency. Acres and Pains was a 1947 collection of mock-Thoreauvian japes inspired by the author's four dec ades of semirustication on 100 stony acres in Bucks County, Pa. His definition of a gentleman's farm: "An irregular patch of nettles bounded by short-term notes, containing a fool and his wife who didn't know enough to stay in the city...
Though he was born in Brooklyn, the city of Perelman's childhood and youth was Providence. His parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia. At Brown University one of his best friends was Nathanael West, the future author of Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust, and a future brother...
...little more than the instrument with which the Chandler family, its sole owners since 1886, scooped out a financial and social empire in Southern California. Real estate deals dictated editorial policy, and news columns seldom threatened the good names and growing fortunes of local business interests. Humorist S.J. Perelman once wrote of a cross-country train trip: "I asked the porter to get me a newspaper and unfortunately the poor man, hard of hearing, brought me the Los Angeles Times...